The bulbs I ordered for my Super 8 movie projector finally arrived so last night Deborah and I settled-in for a midnight movie marathon, however, I’m not sure it can really be considered a marathon since the total running time of three movies was barely half an hour. The first one we cued-up was a faded and yellow eight minute Superman cartoon from the 1940s called The Bulleteers and was, by far, the best of the bunch. Partly because it had sound and I don’t think I’ve ever watched a sound movie on my Super 8 projector before but also because of the cool noirish style. Deborah went crazy taking pictures of the screen but a bottle of Prosecco combined with her camera’s auto focus not knowing how to behave under such circumstances, left her frustrated. “C’mon camera, focus!”
Planet of the Apes came next. Not only was it edited for time — a two hour movie crammed into 8 minutes — but it was edited for content as well. Charlton Heston’s famous “Get your filthy paws off of me you damned dirty ape,” became a safe-for-the-kids, “Get your hands off me you filthy ape.”
I tried my hand at taking some pictures, too.
(Spoiler alert!)
The last one was a French surrealist (Science Fiction?) flick from 1925 about an Eiffel Tower night watchman who wakes up to find everyone but himself frozen in time. There’s more to it than that, but by this time Deborah was walking,naked in front of the screen and I got distracted.
It was an appropriate movie to watch on Memorial Day if only because earlier in the day I was thinking how desolate the city can feel on the holidays — when everyone has left town for the weekend. Jason and I rode our motorcycles to Floyd Bennett Field in half the time it would’ve taken us on any other day. The Kings County fair was held there the past couple of weekends but it was over now. The rides were still there, quiet and motionless.
In other news, I think I mentioned that I bought a new camera. It has full HD movie capabilities, and I bought it intending to make some movies, but so far all I’ve been doing is my usual thing: Graffiti, garbage, and so on.
To confuse things even further, the Super 8 movie marathon inspired me to buy some Super 8 movie film for the Super 8 camera that’s been sitting in a drawer, unused for years. Big plans, big plans.
Always looking for something, so unfocused, so scattered.
A quick visit to the Fort Greene Park Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning led to a day-long project that turned our apartment into an explosion of plants, dirt and flower pots. The plan sounded simple enough: buy pots for the cherry tomato plants that Deborah bought, but one thing led to another and before we knew it we were re-potting every single one of the 25 plants we own. A windowsill of houseplants isn’t quite the same thing as having an outdoor garden, but backyards in New York City are hard to come by — I managed to have one when I first moved to Brooklyn, but my landlord was quickly seduced by the Williamsburg renaissance and sold his building for a half a million bucks a few years after I moved in. If he waited a couple of more years he easily could have sold the place for a solid million, but who knew? In any case, without the rare luxury of a nice backyard, we make do with houseplants.
I but plants for the way they look, but Deborah likes to grow things to eat. Maybe because she grew up on a farm, helping her grandfather pick and plant vegetables so plump, ripe and delicious, that they spoiled her for life. (It’s rare when she doesn’t pluck the pale, bland tomatoes out of her salad at a restaurant.) Hopefully the tomato plants we bought will live up to her high standards. We’ll see.
By the time we re-potted everything, it was eight o’clock. “I’m starving, how about you?”
We took a short walk to an Italian place down the street where a guy was singing Bossa Nova songs — exactly the kinds of songs Deborah likes to sing (minus the cheesy electronic keyboard accompaniment.) In fact, Deborah is starting Portuguese lessons this week to help with her pronunciation. She sang along quietly. A little incongruous to have a guy singing Bossa Nova in an Italian restaurant, but this is Brooklyn.
Deborah tried to order a glass of prosecco. but she was tired, and a little distracted by the music, and asked for a glass of prosciutto by mistake. “I mean, prosecco,” she corrected herself.
“I was going to say, that’s different.” said the waitress.
When the waitress returned with a glass of prosecco, Deborah continued the joke, “I ordered a glass of prosciutto!” she said.
The waitress laughed, took our order, and left the table, returning shortly with a slice of prosciutto draped over a champagne glass. “Here you go,” she said, “On the house.”
Deborah ate it, of course.
In other news, after letting my motorcycle sit idle since breaking my arm last November, I pulled the cover off, re-fitted the battery, filled it with fresh gas, and kicked it to life. The only thing it needs now is a nice long ride to shake out the cobwebs and allow ourselves to get reacquainted. I’m working all week, but the next nice day that I have free, I plan to do exactly that. Stay tuned.
I took this picture of Deborah last week on our way to dinner to celebrate our anniversary. It wasn’t our wedding anniversary, but rather the anniversary of the night we met — which feels more like the real one if for no other reason than we’ve been celebrating it longer.
I originally planned to post the photo along with a story describing our fancy dinner and recounting a conversation that the couple sitting next to us was having. They appeared to be on their first date — a New York City cop with a thick Brooklyn accent straight out of the movies, and a British expat who, perhaps fishing for compliments, said, “When you lead a lifestyle like mine, it takes it’s toll on you.”
“Well, while you were off doing exotic things like traveling around Italy and whatnot, I was busy going to White Castle,” said the cop.
“I ate at White Castle exactly one time,” said the Brit. “It was in 1996, my first time in the states. I was completely drunk, or I’m sure I never would have gone. Horrible. Just awful. I will never go again. Unless, of course, I’m that drunk, which I suppose is always a possibility.”
And so on.
I’d tell you more about it, but I have to run — heading to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania for a family funtime weekend at my sister’s place. Details to follow.
Deborah came home from work on Friday with a craving for Beef Goulash. There’s a Viennese restaurant not far from our apartment and she’d been fantasizing all day long about going there for dinner. “How’s that sound?” she said.
It’s a good restaurant and we hadn’t been to it in a while so it was fine by me.
We’ve never had trouble getting a table there, in fact, one time we were the only customers, so we were surprised to walk into a packed house. “Do you have a reservation?” the hostess asked. When we said no she scrunched her face and and winced. “Sorry, we don’t have anything available.”
“Can we wait?”
“Umm…”
“How about the bar? Can we eat at the bar?”
“I’m afraid there’s no room.”
It was true, the bar was seething with gray hair, fur and tuxedos, barely enough room to squeeze through to use the bathroom. The busboys and waitresses somehow managed to blaze trails through the crowd…excuse me…watch your back…pardon me…but it was otherwise impenetrable. We stood at the entrance in a standoff with the hostess, dodging the waitstaff, and getting bumped on every side side from the all people coming and going.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We’ll find something else.”
But Deborah had her mind — and stomach — set on beef goulash, and wasn’t going to be denied,
“Can we wait?” she said.
“Nothing will open up until 7:30,” the hostess said. “After the show starts.”
The restaurant is directly across the street from BAM (The Brooklyn Academy of Music) and apparently dozens of people had chosen to have dinner at the restaurant before that night’s show.
“Ah, is that what’s going on?” said Deborah. “We were wondering why it was so crowded. We’ve been here a bunch of times and we’ve never seen it like this.”
When the hostess realized that we weren’t just there for the show, and that we were, in fact, regular customers, she suddenly became much more accommodating. “Wait here one moment,” she said, and disappeared into the mass of perfume and bow ties.
“I wonder what the show is.”
“It must be an opera or something.”
The hostess returned and told us that if we didn’t mind sitting with a few strangers, that she could seat us right away at a large table in the middle of the room.
“I don’t mind,” said Deborah, “What do you say?”
“Why not.”
The table was large enough that we could keep to ourselves, more or less, but it was impossible not to at least make some acknowledgement to the people that were sitting with us. We nodded and smiled at the couple across the table — a gray haired old woman draped in a colorful silk scarf and a man with a full head of bushy gray hair dressed in a light colored linen suit with enormous shoulder pads and an extra wide polka dot tie. The woman nodded in return, but the man didn’t seem to even notice us, except to slam his water glass down onto the hard wood table with a loud thump. Was that intended for us? He took another sip of water and slammed the glass down again.
The old lady next to him picked up her conversation with an elegant older woman to her right who was dressed to the hilt in department store finery, her long gray hair sprayed and coiffed into a motionless newscaster style. When old man slammed his glass down a third time, the old lady whispered to him and they got up and switched seats. There was a half-full glass of whiskey on the table and the woman was carful to take it with her, swapping it with the old man’s water glass.
The old man instantly perked up and began flirting shamelessly with the newscaster.
I ordered a Jever while we looked over the menu, and a minute later the waitress brought it to me in an cartoonishly oversized beer mug.
“Are you going to drink all of that?” the old lady, now sitting directly across from me, asked.
“I was just wondering that myself,” I said.
“That’s too much,” she said.
“You’re probably right.”
“My husband ordered this whiskey,” she said, picking up the whiskey glass, “And it was filled to the brim. They poured it like a soda. I had to take it away from him so he wouldn’t drink it all.”
“Now we know why the old man was in such a lousy mood,” I whispered to Deborah.
The hostess came by and asked Deborah if she could seat someone in the empty seat next to her — the last open seat at the table. “Sure, ” said Deborah.
A moment later a guy squeezed into the chair. I smelled him before I saw him. He was a bit of a schlub, his blue dress shirt straining at the buttons across his ample belly, but he appeared to have made an effort, anyway. That is to say, he was wearing a tie.
Our food came and we dug in. “Oh my god, this is so good,” said Deborah, finally realizing her dream.
“The food here is excellent,” said the schlub. “It’s just like Austria. In fact this whole place is just like Austria.”
It was Viennese restaurant, after all, so they’d made an effort in that regard, but the guy’s comment was simply intended to let us to know he’d been to Austria. You could tell he wanted us to ask, “Oh, so you’ve been to Austria before? Tell us all about it.” But we didn’t bite.
“Do you live in the area?” he asked.
“Not far. We live over by the Navy Yard. How about you?”
“I was born in Brooklyn, if you can believe it.”
I’m not sure why he thought we wouldn’t be able to believe it — babies are born in Brooklyn all the time, after all.
“I live in Manhattan now,” he said. “Brooklyn is changing a lot. There are a lot of new buildings going up in this area.”
“There are a lot of new buildings going up all over Brooklyn,” I said. “And quite a few in Manhattan, too, come to think of it.”
“Yes, but I think this neighborhood in particular”
“I take it you haven’t been to Williamsburg,” I think I said, or maybe I just thought it.
“You live by the Navy Yard? Have you ever seen those big mansions over there?”
First of all, they are impossible to miss, second of all, how did he know we didn’t live in one?
“Of course,” said Deborah.
“A childhood friend of mine grew up in one of those mansions. I used to visit him sometimes. The house was enormous.”
“Uh huh.”
“Are you going to the show?” he asked.
“No. We don’t even know what show is playing.”
“Oh, it’s Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.”
“Oh.”
“It ‘s been getting tremendous reviews.”
“You don’t say.”
“It was sold out in Paris.”
“No kidding.”
“It’s with Emmanuelle De Negri,” he said, pronouncing the star’s name with he best french accent. “Are you familiar with her?”
“No.”
“Oh, she’s phenomenal.”
Sorry pops, Opera’s not our bag.
Meanwhile the old couple across from us had left the table, presumably to use the bathrooms, but when the old lady returned, she asked us if we had seen her husband.
“No,” I said, “I assumed he was with you.”
“He has Alzheimer’s,” she said. “I have to keep tabs.”
“Oh no,” said. “We’ll keep our eyes open for you.”
“That explains the David Byrne-sized shoulder pads,” I whispered to Deborah.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife…”
She scolded me with her eyes.
“Sorry.”
“Actually, maybe someone should tell him that the lady he’s been flirting with really isn’t his beautiful wife.”
Soon we saw the old man being escorted back to the table by the hostess. “I see your husband,” Deborah said to the woman.
“Oh thank you,” she sighed. “Can I ask you something, my husband and I haven’t been to BAM in years. Where is it exactly?”
“Oh, it’s right across the street,” I said. “Literally, walk out this door…”
The man next to Deborah interrupted me, “Wait,” he said, “Are you looking for the Opera House?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, it’s right across the street.”
